Re:How to Avoid a Post-Antibiotic World
by akiselev on Sunday January 22, 2017 @04:25PM
(#13457585)
I think you missed the rest of my post, especially where I ended:
> There is lots of value to a variety of traditional remedies that utilize the antimicrobial properties of tea and honey or blood thinners in many herbs but that isn't going to make anyone any money except your neighborhood grocery store or ethnic market. The rest of alternative medicine is just a bunch of snake oil salesmen whose livelyhoods depends on rejecting the foundations of evidence based medicine.
Perhaps we are working from different definitions of "alternative medicine." Wikipedia defines it: "Alternative medicine or fringe medicine are practices claimed to have the healing effects of medicine but are disproven, unproven, impossible to prove, or only harmful." I also have to acknowledge WebMD's definition which is "Alternative medicine is a term that describes medical treatments that are used instead of traditional (mainstream) therapies." I use a middle of the road definition that creates a (perhaps false, perhaps not) dichotomy between evidence based and alternative medicine. Both are broad fields but it boils down to this: when there's enough interesting anecdata or popularity for a therapy that is "alternative," someone eventually pays for a small study to examine it. When enough such studies are done with positive (or at least no conclusively negative) results, metastudies are compiled and eventually the science trickles through evidence based medicine until it hits medical textbooks.
With extended family who are old Soviet trained doctors, I am exposed to a lot of folk remedies, what you would call alternative medicine, but a quick search on Google scholar reveals many peer reviewed studies explaining why many of these remedies work and examining whether there are statistically significant effects. There's not enough profit motive for the pharmaceutical industry to spend nine and ten figure sums on something they can't patent and sell for billions but that doesn't mean we don't know how various tars slow down skin cell replication and help with psoriasis, how antimicrobials in tea, garlic, and honey work, or that many forms of fasting have strong evidence in life extension, let alone general health. This is all evidence based, not alternative, medicine and lumping it all in with reflexology, chakras, faith healing, or magnet therapy is a disservice to our existing scientific knowledge and legitimizes a snake oil industry.
> There is lots of value to a variety of traditional remedies that utilize the antimicrobial properties of tea and honey or blood thinners in many herbs but that isn't going to make anyone any money except your neighborhood grocery store or ethnic market. The rest of alternative medicine is just a bunch of snake oil salesmen whose livelyhoods depends on rejecting the foundations of evidence based medicine.
Perhaps we are working from different definitions of "alternative medicine." Wikipedia defines it: "Alternative medicine or fringe medicine are practices claimed to have the healing effects of medicine but are disproven, unproven, impossible to prove, or only harmful." I also have to acknowledge WebMD's definition which is "Alternative medicine is a term that describes medical treatments that are used instead of traditional (mainstream) therapies." I use a middle of the road definition that creates a (perhaps false, perhaps not) dichotomy between evidence based and alternative medicine. Both are broad fields but it boils down to this: when there's enough interesting anecdata or popularity for a therapy that is "alternative," someone eventually pays for a small study to examine it. When enough such studies are done with positive (or at least no conclusively negative) results, metastudies are compiled and eventually the science trickles through evidence based medicine until it hits medical textbooks.
With extended family who are old Soviet trained doctors, I am exposed to a lot of folk remedies, what you would call alternative medicine, but a quick search on Google scholar reveals many peer reviewed studies explaining why many of these remedies work and examining whether there are statistically significant effects. There's not enough profit motive for the pharmaceutical industry to spend nine and ten figure sums on something they can't patent and sell for billions but that doesn't mean we don't know how various tars slow down skin cell replication and help with psoriasis, how antimicrobials in tea, garlic, and honey work, or that many forms of fasting have strong evidence in life extension, let alone general health. This is all evidence based, not alternative, medicine and lumping it all in with reflexology, chakras, faith healing, or magnet therapy is a disservice to our existing scientific knowledge and legitimizes a snake oil industry.